If the syntax for a given SHOW
statement includes a LIKE
'pattern' part,
'pattern' is a
string that can contain the SQL
“%” and
“_” wildcard characters. The
pattern is useful for restricting statement output to matching
values.

Many MySQL APIs (such as PHP) enable you to treat the result
returned from a SHOW statement as
you would a result set from a
SELECT; see
Chapter 21, Connectors and APIs, or your API documentation for
more information. In addition, you can work in SQL with results
from queries on tables in the
INFORMATION_SCHEMA database, which you cannot
easily do with results from SHOW
statements. See Chapter 20, INFORMATION_SCHEMA Tables.